[Mailman-Users] problem with mm.arch

[Mark Sapiro]

David Relson wrote:
>
>On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 09:46:06 -0700
>Mark Sapiro wrote:
>
>> If you built your archive initially by creating a
>> mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox file with your imported archives and then
>> running bin/arch. Then the archiver would continue to append new
>> messages to mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox and this will always be a complete
>> archive that can be used as input to bin/arch --wipe
>
>Complete, except that messages before day 1 (of the mailman era) will
>be put into directory "month 1" (of the mailman era).

I understand that's what happened in this case where you rebuilt
mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox by concatenating all the monthly .txt files.
What I'm questioning/suggesting is why do this concatenation. If you
created an initial archive in May of 2004 by running bin/arch against
some imported/created global mbox format archive, you could have named
that file mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox and then Mailman would have appended
new messages to that file so that in April 2005, it would be a
complete mbox with all messages with correct dates. Then a simple

bin/arch --wipe mylist

Would rebuild the entire archive with correct dates.

Even if you didn't leave that imported archive mbox as
mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox, if you kept it somewhere, you could have
rebuilt the archive now with

bin/arch --wipe mylist path/to/imported.mbox
bin/arch mylist

Which would first build the archive up to May 2004 and then add
messages since then.

The point is that the mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox file is kept up to date
by the archiving process so it alone or possibly it together with an
imported mbox can always be used to create a new archive. The monthly
.txt files should only be used as a last resort in case the overall
mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox is corrupt or unrecoverable.

--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan